Business enterprises that design and manufacture computer-related equipment and other electronics equipment often maintain and operate laboratories (“labs”) to test and evaluate technology. For example, a company which designs or manufactures such equipment may have one or more labs on-site to evaluate different design concepts or to assess the quality of manufacture of their products. A continuing problem for businesses which use these labs is how to create an efficient design for such a lab. In particular, it is desirable to have an electronics lab that makes efficient use of space while also allowing personnel to move about the lab freely and to easily access equipment for purposes of making repairs, upgrades and other services.
A lab may include a large number of electronic devices, such as computers (e.g., clients, servers, and/or standalone computers), data storage devices (e.g., disk drives), switches, routers and/or other communication devices, etc. To conserve space, the devices may be stacked in rows of racks and/or cabinets. Groups of devices in the lab may be connected together and/or to devices outside the lab, to form a network or multiple networks. These connections, along with the need to provide power to all the equipment, often require a substantial amount of transmission lines (cables) throughout the lab to transmit power and data. The cables consume valuable space and can make access to the equipment difficult.
To handle this problem, some electronics labs are designed to have raised portions of floor, on which the electronics equipment is placed, with the power and/or data cables being routed under these raised floor portions. One problem with this approach is that replacement of cables or modification of cable routing can be very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Also, the raised floor portions can make it difficult to move equipment around the lab. This approach, therefore, is not very flexible.
Another approach is to use some type of structure to support power and data cabling overhead. For example, an overhead bus duct system may be used to route power throughout the lab, while a separate overhead support structure is used to support data cabling. This approach, however, tends to create operational and visual clutter overhead and sometimes interferes with air conditioning and lighting. What is needed, therefore, is an improved design for an electronics lab which addresses these and other problems.